This week is Penguin Week with Nigel Marven (Five). Because it's on Five, it doesn't have the financial welly of a Big Cat Week or Big Bear Week on the BBC. Nigel and his little team pitch up in the Falklands, where they commandeer the yacht Le Sourire (The Smile) to cross to South Georgia. The family home of a nice French family, it looks quite substantial tied alongside the quay. But once they're all on board - Nigel and his team, all their filming and editing equipment, the nice French family - and are being tossed about in a boiling South Atlantic, Le Sourire looks much humbler. There aren't many sourires on the faces of the film crew now, most of which are green for the entire five-day voyage.

South Georgia is a hauntingly beautiful, lonely-looking place - jagged icy peaks pushed up out of the sea, relentlessly lashed by gales. You can almost hear the names of past explorer types - Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton - in the whistling wind.

What Nigel lacks in funding, he makes up for in enthusiasm. He bounds ashore like an eager Labrador and gets to work making friends with the millions of locals. Nigel has always been a penguin addict, he admits; now he can get in there and spend some quality time with them.

Penguins seem to be fashionable right now, as meerkats were a while back. There's no denying their charm: their silly, legless walk, heads waggling from side to side. And their grim determination as they walk up steep, slippery slopes in the face of unforgiving blizzards. My favourites are the macaroni penguins, named, says Nigel, after the 18th-century English dandies who'd been to Italy on their grand tours and come back with pasta and yellow streaky hair; a style also favoured by these birds. Wikipedia disagrees, but I'm going with Nigel, because I like him - he's jolly and personable without being soppy, knowledgeable but not condescending. He just seems like a thoroughly nice bloke, someone you'd want to go to South Georgia with. The penguins agree, and also take to him.

It's not just penguins here. Huge fluffy albatross chicks sit around all winter, waiting for their wandering parents to come home. And elephant seals loll lazily on the shore; we actually see one being born. I think if I was going to give birth to anything, I'd like it to be a seal pup; it seems to be the right shape to be given birth to, and just comes plopping out painlessly. And in South Georgia there are skuas on hand to gobble up the afterbirth. It's all perfect.

If Rod Liddle came up to me outside a supermarket, dressed all in black and looking as if he hadn't washed or cleaned his teeth since the 1980s, wanting to talk about religion, I'd run, which is what most people do in The Trouble With Atheism (Channel 4). He does get a few takers though, as well as a few eminent non-believers, and it's a fascinating programme.

Rod says he sniffs the same sulphurous whiff in the non-believer as he does in the believer, meaning he thinks that fundamentalist atheists are just as arrogant and unreasonable as religious loons. I think he may be right.

It's a nice idea, us all living peacefully together, happily not sure if God exists, and I wish we could. But unfortunately most people aren't as benevolent and reasonable as you, Rod - they like to make up their minds one way or the other, even without the evidence to back them up.

Then Rod goes on to argue that atheism is actually as dangerous as religion, citing Stalin and Hitler and Mao. And this is where he loses me. Secular societies, of course, can be very brutal, but they weren't actually killing in the name of their non-belief, were they? And he may get up your nose in his certainty that he is right, but Richard Dawkins hasn't flown any planes into any churches or mosques in the name of Darwin has he? Yet ...

About five minutes into Losing Gemma (ITV), it started to turn into Losing Sam. A drama about a holiday in India that goes wrong, it was immediately obvious that it was very silly. Being dedicated to my job, though, I sat it out - and what a waste of 90 minutes. It wasn't funny, scary, or moving. It wasn't well acted, or well-written ... it wasn't anything really, except annoying. It made me quite cross. There's another 90 minutes tonight. I'm busy, I'm afraid.